As we enter into the final month of the year many may be getting ready for a break, winding down their tasks and to do’s, spending time doing the things they love over Christmas. But for content creators, this is a time of more content, festive ideas and maybe a bit of Vlog/Blogmas.
Vlogmas refers to vlogging every day in December, whilst Blogmas is all about blogging every day in December/up until the 25th. There are a few variations of this too, such as the 12 days of Vlogmas, which isn’t quite every day, but either every other day in the lead up to Christmas or the 12 days before Christmas. Really you can make of it what you will and pick whatever works for you, but it can be daunting to get it all planned. I’ll be taking on the 12 Days of Vlogmas challenge this year on my YouTube channel and I’ve been doing a lot of planning to get it all sorted, so I thought I’d share some of my tips here.
1. Commit to the challenge
If you’re going to do this it’s best to commit and go all in. Give yourself a deadline to make the decision by and know that you’ve committed to giving this a go and creating this content. I find it helps me go forward to the next stage once I’ve firmly decided if I can make it work. For me, this involved sitting down and brainstorming ideas to see if I could come up with enough and how much time it would take me to create vs time I had available.
2. Don’t panic, take a breath and think about the month ahead.
It can be really easy to decide you’re going to take on this challenge and then suddenly panic about how much work it will actually be. So first off, you’ve already decided you’ll be going ahead, you know how much work it’ll be, take a breath, give yourself a minute and just think about what you want from the month ahead. There is so much fun content to make, just try to give your brain some room to think about it without feeling overwhelmed at the first stage.
3. Write down everything
I am a firm believer in writing things down. I always have a written plan, for my Vlogmas plans I wrote down all my ideas on paper and then copied them into my online Notion planner to play around with go-live dates, then I copied them back down onto paper in my Clever Fox Planner. I find writing things down incredibly helpful because it reduces stress for me to know it’s on paper rather than floating around in my brain. There’s little to no chance of me forgetting things if I have them written down so it helps the process a lot.
4. Create a digital plan you can access anywhere
As I touched on above, I also copied everything into my Notion planner. This is a page I have set up within my Notion (an online note-taking app), that mimics a calendar for my content. This is just when each content is going live and contains both my YouTube content and any paid promotions I’m working on for Instagram that have deadline dates. The reason I like physical and digital copies of my plans is that it gives me access to my lists wherever I am. I prefer writing things physically, but having digital copies means I can check on things whilst I’m out and about too.
5. Work out when you need to create your content vs when it will be live
This step took me ages but was very helpful to do. I suppose this would apply more for Vlogmas content over Blogmas, as for Blogmas you can pre-write a lot of the content. But I had to work out where I would be and when to film enough Vlogmas content to go live, some content required me to be in certain places on certain dates so I had to get that right too. I also had to plan out when I’d edit each video too so I never missed a go-live date. It took a lot of back and forth to get this right, but again is well worth it for the stress it will relieve for me.
6. Plan for breaks
December is a busy month, but it’s also a really fun one. You don’t want to spend the whole time creating content and forget to live in it. It’s so important to include the breaks in your content creation too. For me, I’ll be working super hard and long hours on certain days, so I can have the next day free to chill. I can’t stress enough how important it is to make time for breaks, even if it’s just an evening off every few days, otherwise, you’re much more likely to get burn out.
7. Have fun!
I feel like my last tip is always to have fun, but seriously, enjoy it! And think of how great you’ll feel when your last bit of content goes live and you’ll know you did it!
